Friday, November 21, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Putin Lost Ukraine Even Before the Maidan, Portnikov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 21 – On the first
anniversary of the beginning of the Maidan demonstrations, Vitaly Portnikov
says, it is important to understand that “Putin lost Ukraine even before the
Maidan, before the dispersal of the students, before the bloodshed, before the
occupation or Crimea and before the war in the Donbas.

He lost it, the
commentator says, when he “demonstrated to its citizens that they were living
in a cardboard state, that their president was not a president but a governor
carrying out the will of his master, and that they must … simply wait for the
fate” the Dugins and Prokhanovs sketched out for them (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235221.html).

In the months that followed,
Ukrainians had more than one opportunity to be convinced that with Yanukovich
in office, their country would be a “cardboard” one, “the that the police could defend [him] from the demonstrators but
not the citizenry from bandits, and that the army could not stop even a handful
of diversionists sent from Russia.”

“But with each new disappointment,”
Portnikov says, “the desire [of Ukrainians] to build a state intensified.”
People formed voluntary battalions to defend against the invaders, and they
acted in other ways to lay the foundation of “a genuine state, a state of
citizens” rather than a territory of slaves.

“Like any authoritarian ruler,
Putin, who has unlimited access to financial flows …is convinced that people
are goods” and that he can dispose of them as he chooses. Moreover, he believes
that “”all the revolutions in the world are arranged by the Americans because
they supposedly pay their participants.”

(Putin demonstrated that those are
his deeply held beliefs in his remarks to the Russian Security Council on
Thursday, remarks that show he does not believe that people can make history
but only the top elites of one or another country, an attitude not limited to
him but perhaps more in evidence in the Kremlin leader’s thinking than in
almost anyone else.)

The Kremlin leader is wrong because
he does not understand that real people can make history and that the world he
wants, a world of “dead souls,” may still be true in some places but it is no
longer true in Ukraine.Ukrainian souls “have
turned out to be very much alive,” and Ukrainians have turned out to be “not
the serfs” Putin assumed they were.

But over the last year, Putin has
lost something more: He has lost Ukraine and Ukrainians for Russia as a whole,
he has lost the faith of Ukrainians that they will ever live better under his
rule, and he has lost his standing internationally as more and more of the
world’s leaders recognize what he is about.

That is no small defeat for him and
no small victory for Ukraine, and both of these things should be remembered on
this the first anniversary of the Maidan which gave birth to these two largely
unexpected developments.